TWLL #61: Setting The Tone For Your Worship Set

read time: 3 minutes

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The posture or position of your heart as you begin to lead a time of worship, can set the tone for the rest of the service.

Getting into the right space internally as you hit those opening notes can open the door for a beautiful experience of beholding and worshipping Jesus.

Here are a few thoughts to help your heart land in that space.

Connect With You

Before or as you step onstage, try to get a pulse on where you're at inside.

You might ask yourself, "how am I doing/feeling right now?"  And the idea here is to simply identify and name the space.  

Are you excited?  Are you exhausted?  Do you feel afraid?  Upset?  At peace?  Overwhelmed?

Once you've got a sense of where you're at internally, acknowledge it before the Lord.  In a simple prayer try to articulate to Him the space you're in.

And here's why this is such a big deal.  When you lead worship, you want to lead out of your connection with Jesus.  But your connection with Him is going to be stronger when you're offering Him not just a surface-level version of you, but the real you.

And when you're more self-aware and can identify where you're at internally, you connect your head with your heart, which produces a greater level of authenticity and vulnerability before Jesus.

It doesn't mean you need to say or sing any of this out loud- it simply means you're having an honest internal dialogue with your own heart and with Jesus as you're getting ready to lead.

Look To Him

The next thing you might do is to take the eyes of your heart, and picture Jesus.  I touched on this in last week's letter a bit, and it's very relevant for positioning our hearts as we get ready to lead a set.

At the beginning of your worship time, close your eyes and look to Him.  Use the descriptions of Jesus that Scripture gives- passages like Revelation 1, Daniel 7, Isaiah 53 or Revelation 5.

Doing this helps center you, and gets your heart pointed in the right direction as you get ready to sing to Him. 

Over the years, picturing the Lord using the descriptions in Scripture has been one of the most powerful things to help me connect with Him as I lead worship.

Ask For His Help

The final thought would be to ask Him for help.  Ask Him to help you lead the set, ask for grace to see and behold Him, ask Him for His heart for the people in the room, ask for an ease in the practical aspects of leading your singers and musicians.

When you ask Him to help you, you're positioning yourself in a place of dependence and need.  You're acknowledging that you haven't "got this", and you're owning the fact that you can't do this without Him.

Conclusion

There are multiple aspects of preparing for a worship set.  Putting the song list together, getting the chords and arrangements to the band and singers, running it in practice, and then the actual set-up and soundcheck before the service.

But getting your heart into the right space as you begin- that can set the tone for the entire worship set.  

Take some of these ideas we've covered today, and use them before you hit those first notes of the first song on Sunday.  Help your heart land in the right space as you jump into your worship set.

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1. The Connection-Based Spontaneous Worship Course.  If spontaneous worship has been a struggle, you might want to check out Connection-Based Spontaneous Worship.  It's a self-guided, self-paced course that empowers you to lead spontaneous worship with confidence, enables your musicians to flow with you, and helps your room engage.  

2- Join A Zoom Group.  Every 3 months I host small zoom groups- one focused on worship leading and one on songwriting.  Each group meets once a week for an hour on Zoom over a 12-week period, as we walk through the process of learning to leading worship/write songs out of connection with Jesus.  For more details about the next upcoming zoom group, including schedule & cost, email me at [email protected]